Of all the philosophers in the Hegelian tradition (and I include Heidegger), Sartre is the man who has understood the dialectic between self and other in Hegel's Phenomenology in the most interesting and usable fashion.

This tutoring is dialectical. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turns makes us better readers of life.

Since 2008, we have lived in a fourth stage of the post-1970s crisis sequence, and the by now familiar dialectic of problems treated with solutions that turn into problems themselves is again making itself felt

Building a postcapitalist world is as much a technical task as a political one, and in order to begin thinking about it, the left needs to overcome its general aversion to formal modelling and mathematics. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that the same people who criticise the abstraction of mathematical modelling often adhere to the most abstract dialectical readings of capitalism.

Her modus operandi often involves taking a deadpan, seemingly literal-minded stance on a given concept or question in order to shed light on its contradictions, before then making an unexpected dialectical reversal.

A politics of indebtedness thus poses a basic dialectical problem: how can the constructive and constitutive force of indebtedness be affirmed without erecting an appropriative and destructive apparatus?

Modernity is not meant to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it justice.

in a dialectical reversal peculiar to major advances in social control, the idea that some are free to use others as means to an end, while others are free to allow themselves to be used in that manner, has been proclaimed the very essence of freedom